About
My research interests are in the field of empirical industrial organization, in particular the economics of innovation and the pharmaceutical industry. I have advised the DG Comp of the European Commission in evaluating two different projects on the imapct of mergers on innovation. More recently, I have also done research on the water industry, studying the effects of price and information on water consumption.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Pharmaceutical Industry
- Water Sector
- Mergers and Acquisitions
- Firm Productivity
Current research
At present my research is focused on the following two areas:
(1) the impact of mergers on innovation
(2) joint oligopoly-oligopsony model with wage markdown power
Project (1) is aimed at understanding the effects of mergers on innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. While most of the existing literature has looked at the effect of M&As on innovation using firm-level data, the main novelty of this project is that we investigate how M&As influence the productivity of individual inventors, using patent data in the Pharmaceutical Industry. In August 2019, I was awarded 30-months ESRC grant (£385,000) as Principal Investigator to develop this line of research.
Project (2) aims at developing a theoretical analysis that combines the oligopoly and oligopsony models to produce a unifying framework for the analysis of overall market power, consisting of both product price markup and wage markdown powers. Furthermore, we use such theoretical framework to study the “superstar firms” hypothesis. Our analysis show how “superstar firms” can explain the rise of average labour productivity, the fall of labour income share and wage stagnation at the industry level: all stylised facts extensively debeted in the economic literature.
Research projects
Completed projects
Publications
Teaching
Over the last few years I have been teaching different under-graduate and post-graduate modules, including Statistics for Economics (1st year UG), Research Skills for Economists (2nd year UG), Applied Econometrics (3rd year UG), Industrial Economics (MSc in Economics) and Health Economics and Policy (MSc in Global Health and Public Health). More recently, I created one topic "The economics of Digital Platforms" for the recently introduced module "ECON3038 - Dissertation: Research Topics".
Biography
I am Professor of Economics at the University of Southampton.
I earned my PhD from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in 2004. My research interests lie in the field of empirical industrial organization, in particular the pharmaceutical sector and the water industry. My papers have been published in leading scientific journals, including Energy Economics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, the Journal of Health Economics, the International Journal of Industrial Organization and the Journal of Industrial Economics.